Thoughtless, self-sufficient men say, they can control this desire, can govern their appetite, can enjoy the exhilaration of strong drink, and yet be temperate. Let them look at the poor inebriate wallowing in his pollution. He once stood just where they stand; boasted just as they boast; had as fair character, and as kind friends, and as precious a soul and bright hopes of heaven as they have. Let them tell why he does not control his appetite. Perhaps they say, he is a fool. Ah, what made him a fool? Or, his reason is gone. And what took away his reason? Or, he has lost his character. And what took away his character? Or, his sense of shame is departed. And what took away his sense of shame? Ah, here is the dreadful secret, which it may be well for all, boasting of their power of self-control, to know. At the very moment when the man thinks he stands firm, and reason can control appetite, his moral sense departs, his shame is gone, and he turns, through the power of his morning bitters and oft-repeated drams, into the brute and the maniac. With the moral sensibilities laid waste, reason here has only the power of the helmsman before the whirlwind. “Twenty years ago,” says Nott, “a respectable householder came in the morning with a glass of bitters in his hand, and offered it to his guest, saying, ‘Take it; it will do you good. I have taken it for some years, and I think it does me good; and I never want any more.’ Time passed on, and presently the bottle of bitters in the closet was exchanged for the barrel of whiskey in the cellar; and the poor man was often at the tap for just as much as would do him good, and he never wanted any more. Time passed on, and a hogshead was needful; and its contents were exhausted with the same intent, and the same self-deceivings. At length the home of his family was relinquished to his creditors; his polluted body was lodged in a jail, from which he presently issued a drunken vagabond, and wandered a wretched being, until he found a drunkard’s grave.” It is but the history of thousands. No laws of nature act with more uniformity than the laws of intemperance. No inoculation sends with more certainty disease into the system than drinking strong drink. Hundreds have made an agonizing struggle to escape from perdition. They have seen their sin and danger; they have walked the streets in agony; they have gone to their homes and looked at their wives and children, and into the pit of despair. But their feverish stomach has cried, Give, give! and they have drank often and often, with the solemn promise that it should be the last time; until they have exclaimed, with a once interesting youth, “I know I am a ruined man, but I cannot stop.”
Some, indeed, through much care and strength of constitution, may escape; but the plague, if it appear not in their skin and their bone, may break out in their children. “I will drink some,” said an aged deacon of a church of Christ; “for it does me good.” God was merciful, though he tempted Heaven, and it is said that he died with his character untarnished; but six loathsome sons drank up his substance, with the leprosy in their foreheads. What a meeting must there be between that deacon and his sons on the judgment-day! The doctrine of prudent use must be abandoned. It can have no standard. Every man thinks he drinks prudently, whether he takes one glass a day or five, and is just as much excited and just as liable to drunkenness as all drunkards were when they stood where he now stands. He only that entirely abstains can properly be called a temperate man. And he only is clear from the guilt of spreading intemperance through the land. Moderate drinkers are the life of this bloody system which is wringing with agony the hearts of thousands. Did all at once drink to excess, alcohol would be viewed with dread, as is laudanum and arsenic. Better that all who tasted it were at once made drunkards; then, drunkards would be as scarce as suicides. But men now sip moderately and are reputable; they think themselves safe, but one in every forty sinks to drunkenness; and thus, among twelve millions of people, drinking moderately, the demon has perpetually 300,000 victims. And for these, while all are thus paying homage to the bottle, what is the hope? The lost wretch may wake from his brutality and crime, and resolve that he will reform, and his broken-hearted wife may hope that the storms of life are over, and his babes may smile at his strange kindness and care; but the universal presence of the intoxicating fluid, and the example of the wise and the good around him, will thwart all his resolutions, and he will go back, like the dog to his vomit. All the drunkenness, then, that shall pollute our land, must be traced to moderate drinkers. They feed the monster. They keep in countenance the distillery and the dram-shop, and every drunkard that reels in the streets. Moderate use is to this kingdom of blood what the thousand rivulets and streams are to the mighty river. O how have we been deceived. We long searched for the poison that was destroying our life. The drop said, It is not in me—I am but a drop, and can do no harm. The little stream said, It is not me. Am I not a little one, and can do no harm? And the demon Intemperance, as she prowled around us, said, Let my drops and my rivulets alone; they can do no harm. Go stop, if you can, the mighty river. We believed her. But the river baffled our efforts. Its torrents rolled on, and we contented ourselves with snatching here and there a youth from destruction. But we now see that the poison is in the drops and the rivulets; and that without these, that river of death, which is sweeping the young and the old into the ocean of despair, would cease for ever. And we call upon these self-styled prudent, temperate drinkers, to pause and look at the tremendous responsibility and guilt of entailing drunkenness upon their country for ever.
But we are met with more serious opposers to the plan of starvation. They are, they say, the bone and muscle of the country. They come from the farms, the shipyards, and workshops, and say, If you starve out this monster, we shall be starved out, for we cannot do our work and get a living without rum or whiskey; though, according to their own confession, they have found it hard living with. Their rum and their whiskey have cost them double and treble their other taxes—their sons have become vile, their workmen turbulent, their tools have been broken, and many of themselves are already sinking under its enfeebling influence.
With such it is hard to reason. They have tried but one side, and are incapable of judging the case. We can only tell them there is no danger. Not a particle of nourishment does spirit afford them. The hard drinker totters as he walks. The poor inebriate can neither stand nor go. We can point them to hundreds and thousands of their own profession, honest men, who solemnly testify that they are healthier and stronger, can perform more labor, and endure the frosts of winter and heat of summer better without it than with it. We can ask them whether they fully believe that the God of heaven, a God of love, has put them under the dire necessity of using daily an article which, with such awful certainty, makes drunkards; and whether, when he has said, Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink, he has said, too, you must all drink it; it is necessary for you. But such never can be taught and convinced but by experience; and to such we would say, Try it for yourselves.
Our next opposition, gentlemen, is from a band clothed in white—professors of our holy religion—enlisted soldiers of Christ, engaged to every work of benevolence: they come—O tell it not in Gath!—to intercede for the monster, and oppose our enterprise. Is not this, you ask, a libel? Alas, too often, reports of temperance societies tell of opposition from professors of religion.
What can be the meaning of this? Has not intemperance been the greatest curse to the church? Has it not caused her to bleed at every pore? And have not her members cried to heaven that the destroyer might perish? And now, when God has put into their hands a weapon by which it may at once be exterminated, will they hesitate? Will they hang back? Will they say, we cannot make the sacrifice? O where lies this astonishing witchery? What has put the church to sleep? What has made her angry at the call to come out from the embrace of her deadliest foe? O what has he, who drinks the cup of the Lord, to do with the cup of devils? Does he need it to make him serious or prayerful, or to enable him better to understand the word of God, or bear reproach for Christ, or discharge his Christian duties, or open his heart in charity? Does it not palsy the heart, quench the spirit of prayer, seal up every holy and benevolent feeling, and turn many from Christ, that they walk no more with him? What can a professor mean who refuses to enlist under the temperance banner? Does he really want the monster to live? Does he pray that he may? Will he stand aloof from this conflict? Is he determined to deny himself in nothing? To care not if others perish? To risk shipwreck of character and conscience, and to keep in countenance every drunkard and dram-shop around him? Is it nothing to him that intemperance shall spread like a malaria, to every city, and village, and neighborhood, until the land shall send up nothing but the vapors of a moral putrefaction, and none shall here pray, or preach, or seek God; but ignorance, and crime, and suffering, withering comfort and hope, shall go hand in hand, until we can be purified only by a rain of fire and brimstone from heaven? O for shame, for shame! Let the Christian, pleading for a little intoxicating liquor, be alarmed; let him escape as for his life from the kingdom of darkness. “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”
Next to diseased appetite, the love of money is the most potent principle in the breast of depraved man. Thirty-six thousand distillers, and eighty-five thousand venders of ardent spirits in our land, form a tremendous host in opposition to our enterprise. They live everywhere.
“Pass where we may, through city or through town,
Village or hamlet, of this merry land,
* * * * every twentieth pace
Conducts the unguarded nose to such a whiff
Of stale debauch, forth issuing from the sties
That law has licensed, as makes Temperance reel.”
They live wherever the demon has his haunts. Or rather, he lives where they live; for they feed him. And while he fattens on the article they make and vend, they receive in return the silver and gold of his deluded victims. Now, how can this formidable host, who cry out, Our craft is in danger, by this demon we have our wealth—how can they be met? Can they be met at all? Yes, they can—for they are men; generally reputable men; in cases not a few, pious men; and all have consciences, and may be made to feel their accountableness to God. Now let them be told that they keep this monster alive; that to their distilleries and shops may be traced all the poverty, and contention, and tears, and blood, which drunkenness produces; that their occupation is to poison the young and the old; and by dealing out gallons, and quarts, and pints, and gills, they fill up, with drunkards, the highway to hell; that they do all this to get the money of the wretched victims; that the tears of broken-hearted widows and orphan children are entering into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and that neither God nor their consciences will hold them guiltless in this thing, and sure I am that they will be filled with horror at their own doings, and quit their business.
If there are some so hardened and dead to all the best interests of men as to persist, against the light of the age, in the business of making drunkards, let public indignation burn against them till they can no longer stand before its fires. Let a distillery be viewed as a man would view the inquisition, where the racks, the tortures, and the fires, consume the innocent. Let the dram-shop be ranked, as Judge Dagget says it should be, with the haunts of counterfeiters, the depositories of stolen goods, and the retreats of thieves; and over its door let it be written, “The way to hell, leading down to the chambers of death.” The time has been when a vender could deal out, day by day, the liquid poison to the tottering drunkard, attend his funeral, help lay him in the grave; then go home, post up his books, turn the widow and her babes into the streets to perish with hunger or be supported by charity, and yet sustain a good reputation. But in future, whenever the community shall stand around the grave of a drunkard, let the eyes of all be fixed on the inhuman vender; let him be called to take one solemn look into the grave of the slain and the pit of the damned; and if he will return to the ruin of his fellow-men, let the voice of his brother’s blood cry to him from the ground, and his punishment be greater than he can bear.